


Not One, But Too

by Dhobi ki Kutti (dhobikikutti)



Category: Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Rushdie, Un Lun Dun - Mieville
Genre: Challenge: Eid 2009, Chromatic Character, Crossover, Desi Character, Future Fic, Muslim Character, Sourcelander Character, hyphenate character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-20
Updated: 2009-09-20
Packaged: 2017-10-03 09:18:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dhobikikutti/pseuds/Dhobi%20ki%20Kutti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The alchemy of stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not One, But Too

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://eid-ka-chand.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**eid_ka_chand**](http://eid-ka-chand.dreamwidth.org/)'s 2009 Eid ficathon.
> 
> Beta thanks to [](http://soundingsea.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**soundingsea**](http://soundingsea.dreamwidth.org/) and [](http://naad.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**naad**](http://naad.dreamwidth.org/)

As Haroun steps through the glass and chrome threshold, behind him the remixed quawwali lies submerged beneath the weighty bass line and electronic dhol beats throbbing out of the speakers. Haroun leans his head against the doorframe and feels it tremble. A girl in a Rajasthani choli and jeans dances her way to the club entrance; someone reeking of alcohol scrapes past his shoulder.

 

It _could_ feel like home. Perhaps it even should.

 

But it does not.

 

Haroun has been in London for six months, and he is not sure whether he hates it more because it is not home, or because it can be exciting and seductive enough to raise the possibility of being home in the future. Harlot, he thinks vindictively, calling the city names he would never call a woman. Bloody trumpet-thighed strumpet. Tarty Crumpet. Always open-doored whore.

 

Whore, but not hoor. Not a tawaif, not even a vamp. Because a vamp, like Helen, is not the same as the awkwardly pneumatic, blonde extras in the movies who can do strange flexible things with their legs, but who can never carry a whole item number on their anorexic shoulders.

 

And Haroun's city is the star of the ultimate item number. Kamaal ki cheez and OK THANK YOU HORN PLEASE in one glorious, furious kitchdi.

 

London pales in comparison, with its pasty primness and indecisive fobbishly stammering rainfall.

 

Its pastel tea parties and tabloid tell-alls...

 

"Its 'yo geisha girl' catcalls, its hipsters slumming it in Southall...

Its 'well at least we let you be gay'...

At least it's not Bombay!"

 

The girl sitting on the curb is spitting her words out like a maulvi who is praying by rote. A notebook lies neglected in her lap while she seems to be talking so fixedly to the unbrella in her hand that it is obvious, to Haroun, that her attention is actually somewhere far beyond it.

 

He frowns. "At least Mumbai will let you stay. One crore pop and still no one turned away."

 

The girl blinks out of her focus and knits her eyebrows at him. "Pop?"

 

"Population," he shrugs back into his defensive diffidence around people who constantly ask him to repeat what he's saying.

 

She considers for a moment, then decisively pats the pavement next to her. He sits, closer to the door than she is, but both still marginally out of the way of the post-Ramzaan revellers. The generic desi paltan of party crashers seems to be displacing the iftar crowd, most of whom are wandering outside, on the whole, much less alcohol-drenched and more prone to impromptu odes to chicken biryani.

 

And shairi.

 

"No diss, man," the girl smiles at him, and she has that look of the BBCDs who've sat splay-legged in shorts without anyone scolding them. Nose-ring, spiky hair, and a tattoo on her right shoulder. He squints in startlement.

 

"Is that a _milk carton_?!"

 

She laughs a little self-consciously, and rubs the tattoo, but doesn't pull up the shoulder of her cut-off t-shirt.

 

"I was just trying to get some rhymes together. I need to hear them out loud to know if they work. I'm not normally a blabbermouth."

 

His heart catches. Her written words are startlingly beautiful, the kind of handwriting that should be written with fountain pens on handmade paper, instead of with the ball pen she keeps nervously flicking.

 

"You could be," he says, recklessly, and like a fool. "Be Blabbermouth."

 

She tilts her head as though she has heard an unexpected compliment.

 

"Wait, I know you!" she says. "Aren't you in Uni with me, in that awful class with Professor Cretin?"

 

"With Chrichton Sir?" he replies dubiously, because he could have sworn he had got the pronunciation right from the horse's mouth.

 

"He is a cretin. I've met dead white men who are less in love with their kind than he is."

 

"Mmm."

 

"Oh come on, don't tell me you need to be so respectful that you can't agree. I remember the argument you had with him in class that day about the source of stories and culture and oral traditions."

 

Haroun remembers feeling his heart beating as though he were attempting to fly off a cliff in a bus; the need to defend his point overriding his wariness of speaking up in a system that rewarded 'discussion' but kept describing his enthusiasm as 'yelling'.

 

Now that he thinks back, he realises he had noticed her. Hers is the back of the girl sitting two rows ahead. Silent and stiff-spined, and the whole time he was trying to be polite and articulate amidst his fury as chootia Cretin squashed him down to size, she was the one filling page after page with quick, compelling drawings of dustbins with frog legs, and knives attacking the London Bridge.

 

He reaches for her notebook, but his fingers ask permission before landing on it. Hers stroke the curve of the unbrella's handle before handing the pen over in response.

 

He smiles, and then furrows his brows as he flips to the back of the notebook, and writes.

 

"Cretin fishes in an empty sea. His yacht is all for naught.

Whales are not the only fish who sing, and even dead tails can talk..."

 

She reads out loud over his shoulder, though she waits till he's done nervously crossing out 'yaught' and 'yout' before taking the pen back in her own hand. She fixes yacht, but not tail, and he suddenly remembers hearing his mother's voice singing in the house, in the morning after the night he was afraid to go to sleep.

 

Soraiya wasn't the one who left, finally, but happy ending seemed to become a pun as Haroun grew, and he was comfortable stretching the meaning of home to connect Soraiya's seaside flat with Rashid's succession of hotel rooms, guesthouses, and houseboats. Not home but as beloved was the third point of his triangle, and he did not think there would ever be another counterpoint to square off with.

 

"Tales tail off in tentacles not wise to ignore

He throws tails that twist and hiss as trash on the cutting floor

But detritus screams De Treat Us and those who walk away

Stay safe and sane and smug, and never get to _play_."

 

She writes in starts and stops, her lips taste-testing the words like a chef. Haroun leans over to watch, and she pulls her notebook away, but not her hips and knees where they are pressed against his, and after she is done, she hands him the pen and paper.

 

He writes and crosses out several attempts before sighing and saying, "The thing is, the thing is... it's not even so important, always, this grand... grand hunt. Sea quest."

 

She purses her lips, and nods. "This Pursuit of the Narrative. By a Hero. Who Knows Best."

 

Her eyes are black, and her skin is brown, and her nails are green and purple, and she is so strangely familiar, so unremarkably alien. Haroun taps the pen against the notebook to measure the metre of his words.

 

"Why... why can't there be no One Story, what's wrong with... with cacophony, with many different destinations, and one's is a hospital and one has chickens and it's ok to be back and forth and messy and jerky like... like a bus." He bites his lip.

 

"A bus." She echoes. "Not for heroes, but for the rest of us."

 

They look at each other, the smile in their eyes and the wonder tugging at their mouths.

 

A couple stumbles past them, the blonde girl with her hand wrapped both practically and affectionately around the Chinese girl's waist. "Hey Dee – aren't you glad I dumped you now?" the white girl says with a very drunk smile, and Haroun does not feel any tension in the shoulders next to him, as the couple receives a genial wave and admonition to make Zanna drink some water.

"Ex-girlfriend," she explains with a casualness that Haroun tries to match in his nod back. But then she flips back to the page she was working on before, and says, "Bi doesn't rhyme as easily as gay", and it is not a non sequitur.

"Dee...?"

"...Ba. Deeba. Deeba Resham", she says her own name with the British accent that sandpapers the sounds, leaving soft splinters like tussar silk catching on calloused fingers.

"I'm..."

"Haroun." She says it the way he does, and smiles at his surprise. "And you'd rather not be called it as though you're from here. I know."

Haroun looks up at the first moon, new and barely smiling. "But then, you're not really from here either, are you," he says.

"Oh no, I am from here," she says, leaning forward and fluttering her hands as though there is something very important and fragile balanced on their laps between them. "But also. Also from... somewhere else."

"Ah." He can't help the bitterness that spikes his words like karela juice. "That must be fun, and you can fly back and forth whenever you want to get the best of both worlds."

She uses her unbrella to spear a fluttering newspaper, and folds it carefully as she replies. "Well, it's been both the best of times, but also the worst of times. And... I take a bus, most of the time. Like the rest of us." She looks at him as though he is exactly the sort of commonplace mystery he finds her.

Haroun sighs. "I like busses." Softly, "I like the bus driver."

She smiles like a butterfly has landed on her nose. "I do too! And the bus conductor."

She stands up, and puts the rescued litter in a dustbin, patting the lid as she does so. "I'm not going to classes tomorrow. My family doesn't really do much for Eid, but it's ridiculous that everyone has to use their personal days if they want an off, and so a bunch of us are protesting by writing formal letters to all our profs asking to be excused from classes and saying we're willing to make it up on the next bank holiday, only of course, they won't want to do that, so all we're doing is annoying them a little, which is really the point of it."

"Oh," Haroun misses the warmth of her bare legs against his. "Ok. Then I won't go too."

She extends a hand out, and he takes it, lets her tug him upward. "Do you have family or friends to go to?"

He dusts himself off carefully. "No. I guess I'll go somewhere else." He does not know where. He has not enjoyed being alone in this city.

She bites her pen. "I'm going Somewhere Else too. Somewhere Not London." The unbrella's sides flutter as though it is holding its breath. "You want to come along, then? We can go by bus."

Haroun thinks about places Not Here, cities Not Their Own. He thinks about what being Not Home means, and the places where they can be At Home. He looks up at the sky, at the moon he can see now, the one so eagerly sought for. He can sense that P2C2Es are happening; that this girl will Un Home him, perhaps even for good. Khattam shud.

He smiles at Deeba. "Yes," he says. "Yes, let's do that. Tomorrow."

There are still Stories left to tail.


End file.
